You’re admiring the trays of petunias, including a radioactive purple pulsing in the April sun, when you feel a soft touch on your bare leg. You turn and look down to espy your accoster, a three-foot-high plant with shiny dark green leaves and long, questing vines waving in the wind. You know this plant, you had one a while back, possibly purchased from this same stall on the northeast edge of Union Square. Mandevilla, with a half-dozen blooms of a milky red you have trouble naming until you squat and look at the plastic tag: Raspberry Kiss.
You’ve never met such a forward shrub, to reach out and caress your calf so sensuously. Many plants will look at you and say “Tada!” Very few will physically stroke you, like some hooker in a dockside bar. Hey, sailor, let’s get out of here. Take me back to your place.
It reminds you of the first time you saw Buffy, in the shelter cage in the back of the pet store on 23rd St. So alert and engaged, standing on her hind legs boxing her paws at the poking fingers, giving them playful nips. You know cats, and you could see she was a good one. You tried to resist; you didn’t need or have room for a second cat in your little studio. But you came back the next day. And the next. This calico had pizzazz. And you weren’t the only one noticing her. The little boy looked sad when you told his mother you’d put in the papers to adopt Buffy.
Buffy working the crowd at the pet store. Mandevilla tapping strangers in the breeze. Hard sell. Take me home.
While you were squatting down there, you also noticed a price of $49 — double what you paid six or seven years ago, albeit for a smaller plant. It is an okay price for New York City, factoring in the times we’ve been through; plague, supply chain woes, inflation. This is a hardy, mature plant on a solid trellis, ready to spread her vines and do business. Indeed, you had thought about getting a large plant for the clay barrel. It’s the signature pot on your small terrace. It needs a headliner. But $49? And you would have to carry it home from the farmers’ market, crossing Broadway, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th avenues.
You groan and creakily rise to standing. Fortunately, you don’t have to decide anything now. Your rule, which you break occasionally, is to never buy anything without first making a full circuit of the farmers’ market. You’ve barely started on this breezy Saturday afternoon. A fleeting thought crosses your mind as you move on. What if someone takes her while you’re gone?
The window box. The other one, the second one. Your mission today was to decide its style and occupants, hopefully with more guile than the first one, which came out a jam-packed Jackson Pollock jambalaya of colors. This second box will be more thought out, more refined. As you browse, you see purple and mauve pansies, and light peach. Perhaps some white hollyhocks for a little height. Maybe some of these delicate yellow ones. You visualize an interesting mix reminiscent of your old aunt’s shadowy living room in El Paso; dusty crocheted pillows, New Yorker magazines and corroded lemon hard candies in a glass jar.
You break your browse-first rule and pick up some carrots, potatoes and beets for the root vegetable bake on Sunday. You already have onions and garlic at home.
The market is jammed with people as you bob and weave through the crowd, the music playing in your earbuds. You pass the honey stands, homemade pretzels and baked goods. Small-still whiskeys, lavender soap and dried flower bouquets.
You see a woman in pioneer garb and pigtails typing on an old-style mechanical typewriter. ‘Poems for sale’ reads a sign at her feet. Two women are waiting for their poem as she types.
Hey lady, write a poem titled “The End of an Old Friendship.” Describe the poignant ache of a defection by someone you thought would always be in your camp. Slogging against headwinds to keep it going, watering dead flowers. Finish with the lesson learned, dragged out as it has been since the big fight years ago: If someone tells you they don’t enjoy your company anymore, you should believe them.
You’ve navigated the crowd to the southwest corner of Union Square, where the farmers’ market gives way to street vendors, jewelry and artwork, incense and glass weed pipes. On your right is a triangular plot of greenery enclosed in black wrought iron. Inside is a life-sized bronze statue of Gandhi in round spectacles and sandals, setting out with his walking stick. You think of the carnage in Ukraine, so senseless.
Of course you can afford a $50 whim, if you so choose. Thanks to the kindness of fate and your own dogged efforts. But weren’t you going to scale back the terrace garden this year? Focus on tossing stuff? Since you might be out on your ear, now that the landlady has discovered she’s been woefully undercharging all these years for a Chelsea studio with outdoor space. She told you in the hallway that rents would be going up, and you cautiously asked “a few hundred?” “Oh, no,” she’d said solemnly. “More.”
So that’s been hanging over your head, although it’s been months since she spooked you. It could not be a worse time to be apartment hunting, with so little inventory and all so pricey. And now that you’re retired, won’t the realtors be choosing people with defined annual earned income statements, not spotty IRA withdrawals? You’re probably dead in the water for any competitive bidding situation.
Well, you decided a long time ago that when the time came you would leave with a smile. You had a great deal for a long time and it had to end sometime. All you can do is be grateful for the past and try to be positive about what comes next. Which is also your overall strategy for growing old.
The thing is, the plant reached out and touched you. It’s very rare for plants to make themselves known in that way. They’re not physically mobile save for the odd Venus flytrap and such. And you didn’t want Buffy at first, and look how that turned out. She’s the best cat you’ve ever had. So affectionate and friendly, the life of the party. Buffy has aplomb. The very first night you brought her home, she crept out of the bathroom and jumped onto the foot of your bed to sleep. What would your life have been like without her these past six years? How would you have fared in the pandemic without her vigorous purr as you spooned at night? The cheerful wake-up-and-feed-me nuzzles in the morning. You’re my angel sent down from heaven; that’s what you say to her in hillbilly twang, and lots worse. Scruffy Buffy. Buffalina. Buffalota. Boobie baby Buffy.
You’re passing though the southern plaza of Union Square, an open space with gentle steps and bronze historical plaques embedded in the cement. This would be a good place to twirl and throw your cap in the air if you were Mary Tyler Moore and Times Square was booked. Emma Goldman held union rallies in Union Square. That might be where the name comes from.
There’s a huge clock on the face of a Best Buy building on the southside of 14th street, a long string of digits counting down to the end of the world. It used to be counting down to the end of the millennium – that’s dating yourself! – but now it’s some sort of ecological warning. Time is running out. Well, we all know that.
The young people call it FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out. And there’s also YOLO, You Only Live Once. They’re usually applied to great adventures, not the buying of touch-feely plants. But you’ve ruminated on it so long that you don’t want to live without knowing what it’s like to have it in your garden. Your final garden, perhaps. The other window box will have to wait.
So you buy the red mandevilla, with her raspberry blooms and impudent vine arms. They double bag it and you add your veggies inside before hoisting it onto one shoulder. On the walk home, you bang its top on scaffolding trusses and wince as if you’d hit your own head. You scoop out the dirt from your barrel pot and sink it in, then pack soil in the narrow gaps between pot and root ball. You soak it with water. Then you get a beer and sit down in your little NYC outdoor space and admire her, Mandy, Mandy Mandevilla. The plant that reached out and said “Hey fella.”
*Yeah, you were high
